If you’re not viewing this full screen on a huge 27” or large screen you’re missing out: MARS Curiosity Rover first Color 360 Panorama.

The title basically covers it. Long read, but worth it I think. Kudos to the RasberryPi guys for standing their ground when a Nutjob attempts to extort $35 computer from non-profit foundation.

Cool! Tweetbot for Mac beta released, but with some account restrictions thanks to Twitter turning into douchebags.

This afternoon Tweetbot has got our attention once again, as the beta has officially been released. Due to the recent API changes Twitter has endured on its app developer community, beta is only accessible to users that authorized their account with the alpha. In the beta you can’t add or remove accounts, which is definitely disappointing.

This has been passed around a bit over the last couple of days. The Facebook Timeline of a photograph is a fun look back through history, all the way back to 1000 AD.

Amidst the fever of rumors and leaks for the (rumored) upcoming iPhone 5 with a larger screen, here’s a great Video Demo of What a 4” iPhone Screen Looks Like in Action.

Remembering of course that Apple has said absolutely nothing about anything, and the “confirmed” rumors of the “confirmed” event in a couple of weeks and the “confirmed” parts leaks letting everyone put together what a “confirmed” iPhone 5 will look like and then create videos like the one linked to above of what a “confirmed” 4” iPhone 5 screen will work like…. well, it’s all guessing.

Interesting to note that a lot of time in the (albeit short) video above is for gaming and videos, and doesn’t really show normal apps running in landscape orientation.

The most awesome video of 2 Hamsters in 1 Wheel you will see today.

Remember a few days ago when someone completely botched the restoration of a historic painting? Think you could do better? Now you can Restore your own Ecce Homo!

Check out what others have done by searching for other submissions at #ceciliaprize

Great compilation of 10 Doctor Who Episodes For New Fans To Check Out in preparation for the new series, starting this Saturday. Glad to see that my favorite episode of all time was honored in there too:

Repeatedly pointed to by fans as one of the best episodes of all-time in Doctor Who history, Blink is one of writer Steven Moffat’s finest hours.

Of course, all the listed episodes are amazingly good, and you should stop everything you’re doing right now to watch them all.

Interesting read: GNOME Founder Says Desktop Linux is Dead

Miguel de Icaza, one of the founders of the GNOME project, has said that OS X has ‘killed the Linux desktop’.

Definitely some stuff to think on in there, and as someone who was a full on Linux fanboy from 1994 to 2008 or so, it’s sad but (in a way, and IMHO), true. There will always be a Linux Desktop, and I think that everyone will agree that the “Year of the Linux Desktop” is mostly a joke right now, and this is just someone enumerating why the Linux Desktop failed.

All is not lost. Apple is getting some interesting blow back for being too big (after years of getting blow back for being too small), Windows is… well, Windows, and Microsoft is the company everyone loves to hate, so Linux really is the OS to go to for a lot of people. Thing that has to happen is the default install on say, an 8 core, 6G modern machine, shouldn’t peg the RAM and CPU for the first 5 minutes of use, at least, based on my Ubuntu 12.04 install on a modern and fast laptop.

Regardless of my bitching about Ubuntu, Miguel has some good points about the alienation of third party software developers, seen in the lack of a stable standard for things like audio and video and the massive number of available linux distributions.

Make your own lava, then pour it onto ice. Yup, exactly that. Very cool.

President Obama’s doing an AMA on Reddit today, invites the people to pose their digital questions. In case you wondered why the site was down.

ForgetFoo has a video of the Google Fiber speed test.

Uhm… “wow”.

Geeks of Doom has a video of an Alternate Opening For ‘The Avengers’

The alternate intro debuted on Yahoo, and it shows New York City having just survived Loki’s attack. The intro almost mirrors the aftermath of 9/11, with glimpses of police officers and soldiers helping the injured. The only superheroes that make it into this alternate cut are Hulk, who only gets a quick glimpse, and Captain America, who is appears in the corner of the clip. But that’s what I like most about this clip, is that the real heroes are out there doing the best to protect us from any threat and they will not stand down. It also shows that superheroes can be just as vulnerable as humans.

What better way to feel better about yourself than by watching others failures? I give you the August 2012 Fails on Devour.com. Note: some not for the faint of heart.

Another layer of security for your Dropbox account:

Hi everyone! A few weeks ago, we discussed a number of steps we’re taking to add an extra layer of security for Dropbox users. Today we’d like to announce the launch of two-step verification, a feature that will enhance the security of your Dropbox by requiring two levels of authentication: your password, and a security code that will either be texted to your mobile phone or generated by a mobile authenticator app (available for iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7).

Saw on the Diaspora blog that Diaspora* Will Now Be A Community Project.

Today, we are giving control of Diaspora to the community. As a Free Software social project, we have an obligation to take this project further, for the good of the community that revolves around it. Putting the decisions for the project’s future in the hands of the community is one of the highest benefits of any FOSS project, and we’d like to bring this benefit to our users and developers. We still will remain as an important part this community as the founders, but we want to make sure we are including all of the people who care about Diaspora and want to see it succeed well into the future.

Or if I were to translate “we have no idea how to make this work so we’re making it open source. Rings a bell somehow.

I have the best of hopes, but honestly Diaspora didn’t have a hope from the start, they got a metric shit-tonne of money (that’s how I measure things) because everyone hated facebook, but just couldn’t deliver. They had some interesting ideas, but no hope of “beating” facebook.

Found Yes, You Can Trust Your Professional Photographer via @worstofmayhem. Basically it is a photographers reaction to an article which basically indicates that you can’t trust your photographer because they are probably an idiot who just took a class, quit their job and are now charging exorbitant rates yet has no skills.

Ahh… stupid people. We really cannot legislate against stupid people. Anyone who watches a YouTube video and quits their job to become a photographer with no experience is… well… a stupid people.

It’s a good read, especially if you’re a photographer (or play one on tv).

The Doctor Who: New Series 7 Trailer has tons of goodness. Can’t wait!

RIP Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon. First man on the fucking moon. Seriously, assuming you’re not a conspiracy theorist who thinks it’s a sound stage, how epic is that? In honor of this, LIFE has republished their Apollo 11: To the Moon and Back edition.

Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon, died on August 25, 20012. In honor of his life and career, LIFE.com is republishing the page spreads — and, in effect, the entire issue — of LIFE magazine’s famous August 11, 1969, special edition, “To the Moon and Back.” For millions of people who witnessed the Apollo 11 mission, watching on television or following it on the radio as humanity improbably, marvelously, actually walked on the moon, the event perhaps did not feel quite real until, more than two weeks later, LIFE published its definitive account of the epic journey.

If you’re vaguely into photography you’ve heard about Craft and Vision, by Mr. duChemin and their excellent eBooks for photographers. Well, Craft & Vision is 3 Years Old and have a slew of announcements including a quarterly magazine, that the C&V community (previously a paid, closed service) is free (Sept 1 anyway), and others. Great way to start off the Monday morning.

Just in: The jury has (very surprisingly) reached a verdict in the Apple Samsung decision. The Verge has the live blog: Live: Apple vs. Samsung: jury decision.

Will update when I hear more.

Update 1: Looks like it’s going to Apple. Samsung has been found to infringe on Apple’s patents (so far) on most (but not all) devices.

Update 2: So mostly siding with Apple for the phones, no infringement on the tablets, and again phones yes, tablets no for the “should have known” question.

Regardless of my own opinions, I think this is bad news and not a good precedent to set (if it’d gone to Samsung I’d say the same thing). Also I’m sure that the appeals have already been filed.

The New Furby Review: Absolute Horror.

If you’re not five years old, and dumb, exposure to the Furby is about as bad as smallpox spores. The gimmick quickly wears off, and it’s then a constant, gnawing source of aggravation. It’s like a device designed specifically to annoy. In that sense, it’s sort of brilliant, in the same way a crossbow is a brilliant way to shoot an arrow through someone’s neck.

Great Red Dwarf X teaser from my buddy Eldon.

The Oatmeal asks Now what?.

I know I’ve said this before, but to everyone who donated: THANK YOU. THANK YOU SO GODDAMN MUCH. WE ARE GOING TO BUILD A GODDAMN TESLA MUSEUM.

I say “wow”.

If this video of Curiosity landing on Mars in High-Res (downward view from the rover itself) doesn’t bring a slight tear to your eye you are dead inside. DEAD.

This movie from NASA’s Curiosity rover shows most of the high-resolution frames acquired by the Mars Descent Imager between the jettison of the heat shield and touchdown.

Seriously one of the most awesome things I’ve ever seen.

While I’m not sure that I’d use something like this, the Quikdraw lens holder does look like an interesting concept, especially for event photographers.

Currently they’re at $39,000 of their $100,000 goal, with 23 days to go. Fingers crossed for Riley Kimball to make it!

Via f-stoppers.

Dogshaming is quite possibly the funniest thing I've seen all day.

VMware Announces VMware Fusion® 5. Short story is updated, faster, windows 8 optimizations and USB3 support. Not sure if I’ll upgrade from VMware Fusion 4 though, I use it for running linux and windows on my mac and it seems to work fine, and it might not be worth the cost to upgrade. Still, for some this will be a nice upgrade :)

Spotify to Launch in Canada… exciting news! No dates yet, but it’ll be nice to have. The US folks sometimes forget that a lot of the services they take for granted (Hulu, Spotify, etc) are all not available outside of the good ol’ US-of-A.

STOCKHOLM—Spotify is set to launch its popular music-streaming service in Canada, and has further plans to possibly expand into Asia and South America, according to the Anglo-Swedish company’s recently published annual accounts.

The 9 Most Ridiculous Moments of the Apple vs. Samsung Trial. Gizmodo.

Saw over at TUAW that ZooGue’s Social Case Pro is free for a limited time, you only pay shipping.

To order one, rush out to the ZooGue website and enter the promo code FreeZooGueAccessory when you check out. You still pay for shipping and handling.

$7 to ship to Canada, so not that bad, even if the case is terrible I’m only out the cost of a couple of cups of Tim Horton’s coffee. It does seem that it’s only iPhone 4S, not 4, but I took the chance that it’ll work with the 4.

To the Velociraptor in Melbourne all I can say is “oh wow that’s great”.

Some other content here from this reddit thread.

With reviews like this, why is Apple bothering to go after Samsung? Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 Review: An Embarrassing, Lazy, Arrogant Money Grab.

On the software side: Samsung desperately wants to develop the next version of Android themselves, but they lack the technical ability, vision, ecosystem support, and design chops to make it happen. They want to add features, and maybe even have a good idea or two, but they just can’t execute those ideas in a way that makes them good. Split screen, for instance, needed to be a core OS function, but it’s clearly a hack that was tacked on at the UI layer. It’s a bunch of tricks that look like split screen, but you’re never really running 2 apps at once.

The Avengers Gag Reel. Just what it says :)

OMG so much better! Four Clicks to a Less Annoying YouTube.

You know what’s awful about YouTube videos? Sure you do! Annotations are awful. Because more often than not, they’re less “annotation” and more “HEYDIDYOULIKETHIS?!!? SUBSCRIBE NOW BUY ON ITUNES!!!!!” Most of you probably click off annotations (and to a lesser degree captions) nearly every time you watch a YouTube video. Do yourself a favor and turn them off for good, right now.

Great look at The Pointless History of Stylus Advertising: The Worst E-Ink Spots From Samsung, HP, Apple.

Outside magically minimizing files, Stylus pens are often shown circling things and crossing things out. In tons of ads that feature Stylus pens, users are constantly shown looking at an image or a website or some product, and simply using the pen to circle things, point to things, or cross things out. In another ad for the Asus’ Eee slate, for example, a fashion blogger is showing doing all three (0:33): X-ing out one picture, circling another, and then drawing an arrow for good measure.

This is pretty damn funny: This ‘Leaked’ Promo Video for the iPhone 5 Is Not Real But it Should Be.

The Man With The Iron Fists Red Band Trailer #2. Looks like another awesome Kung-Fu movie.

Hat tip, Geeks of Doom.

Now that Windows 8 has RTM’d, there’s also been a leak of Skype for Windows 8’s UI.

Very “windows phone”-y. Not terrible. Course, as with all things Metro Windows 8 style, I really wonder how well something like that scales if your skype contact list is 300 people long instead of 12.

The Verge has a good story on the twitterpocolypse that’s ongoing now that twitter announced it’s new 1.1 API, and has a good take on the story:

Twitter has been broadcasting for quite some time that it would be making changes to the API that developers use to access it for apps and today the company is finally beginning to detail what those changes are. First and foremost, developers who create apps that perform traditional 3rd party Twitter client functions (like Tweetbot) will be limited to 100,000 users total before the developer must get “permission” and/or “work with [Twitter] directly.” Current apps will be able to continue to function as normal, however once their “user tokens” double whatever they are today, these new restrictions will apply. Essentially, once any 3rd party app hits its user limit, the developer will need to have a “come to Twitter” moment at which something will happen, and the most likely scenario is that the app simply won’t be able to take on more users.

In essence, twitter wants to control the twitter experience for the end user, and cut out 3rd party developers who create new clients who may or may not mimic the current UI, or may make it better. Of course, they also want to make sure that the display is strictly controlled, as noted by Gruber in the display guidelines. This will of course mean that twitter won’t be letting any clients that do things like say, remove “promoted tweets”, slim down the rapidly-getting-bloated web UI, or do things like create a better twitter UI.

In their rules for the number of clients, they are also essentially limiting the max amount of money that a developer can earn making a twitter client (100,000-200,000 * $), making it unattractive to pour development efforts into a twitter client, and of course that’s a good thing for twitter.

A bold move, lets see if anyone but the geeks and developers care or not. Interesting that they do this right on the heels of paid twitter alternative app.net getting funded.

The BlackBerry Developer Blog posts about Standardizing on Screen Resolutions for BlackBerry 10 devices, which looks like it’s settled on making developers lives more simple and has announced:

• Full touch devices: 1280 x 720 (16:9)
• Keyboard devices: 720 x720 (1:1)

Of course, the question of ‘will it matter’ to RIM’s financial position is an entirely different question.

Via OSNews.

Instagram 3.0 is rolling out and it adds geo-tagged photo map and UI tweaks. Looks pretty nice.

Dear America… the people who put out this sort of Government “Run Hide Fight” Videos are part of the reasons that you are mocked. This video seriously sounds like something out of the book 1984. I’m not as offended by the implication that people “taking suspicious pictures” are terrorists as the idiocy of it all.

I say fight back against the idiocy. Report everything. See someone leave their car to run in and get a coke? Report it. See someone wearing jeans on a day when the temperature is over 20C? Report them. See someone you’ve never seen before near your building? REPORT THEM.

Sigh.

The oatmeal is on a mission: Help me raise money to buy Nikola Tesla’s old laboratory.

Do it.

Techcrunch: Windows 8 Is Now Available For Developers (And For Everybody Else, There’s A 90-Day Free Trial, Too):

As expected, Microsoft today announced that Windows 8 is now available for download for its paying MSDN and TechNet Professional subscribers. The company, however, is also making a 90-day evaluation version available to all developers (or anybody else who wants to give the Windows 8 RTM a try) without the need to pay for a subscription. There are some caveats, though: this version will expire in 90 days and you won’t be able to upgrade to a non-evaluation version.

Another awesome panorama from Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 2. Also works on your iOS device with gyroscope support.

Pretty neat data visualization of Grubers posts over 10 Years of Daring Fireball.

Via, unsurprisingly, Daring Fireball.

Thomas Hawk welcomes Marissa Mayer to Flickr:

Pretty much ever since the day Marissa Mayer joined Yahoo as CEO I’ve been doing a search for her name as a member of Flickr. I’ve been heavily invested both in terms of personal energy and emotion in Flickr as a place to showcase my photography on the web and have been critical over the years of how Yahoo executive leadership has handled the site.

Update: Not her) :(

Got to say that Seven Psychopaths looks epic.

The premise is pretty simple: three people working in the dog kidnapping business (Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, and Christopher Walken) unwittingly take a dog that belongs to an emotionally unstable mob boss (Woody Harrelson). From there it is escaping the mob, trying to survive, and figuring out how to make a profit from all of this.

Well, 9to5 Mac isn’t into a $259 Smartphone receipt printer, but do note that it might have it’s uses:

I am not feeling it, but I imagine there will be some special use cases. As The Verge notes in an interview with Berg cofounder Matt Webb, you could put one of these at your grandma’s house and just send her black and white notes/receipts all day. You can even have it set up to print news on a smartphone-sized scroll of paper. :/

We covered this here on ufies last November, where I was excited about it (as I get with new things) but it was before we knew the price.

Saw this nice long post on resolution and displays at Daring Fireball and didn’t realize until I read Shawn Blanc’s post that it was a ten year anniversary for John. Congrats for the years of great posts, sarcasm, and not feeding the trolls!

I can’t help but say something along the lines of “10 years, yea, that’s not too bad I guess” :) Of course, I have a feeling that Mr. Gruber has done a hell of a lot better with his ten years than I have with my 13….

In the latest Pebble smart watch update, the team has lots of interesting things, coolest of which is this UI preview video.

Hearing that uTorrent Becomes Ad-Supported sucks, but what did you really expect after they were bought by bittorrent inc. :(

The company explains that aside from ads the sponsored torrents will also be used to inform users about important updates and to promote artists.

Hopefully a new small, no frills client will jump in to fill the void.

Via TorrentFreak.

The Mars Curiosity Rover sent back today a great panorama of the martian crater.

According to Join.App.net, this kickstarter-like-funded, paid twitter replacement has met (and exceeded by $246,000 as of this writing) it’s funding goal of $500k.

The big question now is, will it take off and be successful, or will it be a small island of folks in an island corner unto themselves? Can’t wait to see.

Geeks of Doom has the Trailer For Dan Bradley’s Remake Of ‘Red Dawn’.

Not sure if I like the marines thing, but looks interesting.

WOLVERINES

Ars Technica interviews Allan Odgaard, TextMate author who showed up in the spotlight yesterday for open sourcing TextMate 2.

Ars Technica:

Lead TextMate developer Allan Odgaard’s decision yesterday to open source the code for the long-awaited version 2.0 was met with a lot of criticism. Ars readers chimed in via comments, our Open Forum, and Twitter, questioning Odgaard’s motives and slamming his current choice of GPLv3 license. We spoke to Odgaard hoping to clear the air on the matter, though he wasn’t very confident that his explanations would “affect public perception of the project.” However, he was adamant that his decision to open source TextMate 2.0 was not a sign that he was giving up on the now six-year-long endeavor to build a new version from scratch.

No email for the last few hours? The fact that that list.dsbl.org is offline might have something to do with it. The issue started around 3pm PST thursday and (as far as I can tell) any mail sent to servers using this blacklist would have been bounced (not delayed) :(

As an aside, I use(d) this on UFies, so if you have a mail account here, this is why you haven’t gotten email from last night :( Sorry folks.

Apparently the server has been unloved and closed for years now, and they finally got tired of still getting requests and made it reject all mail so that lazy sysadmins (ie: yours truly) would actually do something about it. sigh

So what’s the canonical list of good RBLs? Or does everyone just use gmail or some other hosted service?

Pretty awesome if you’re into model building and want a 1:1 scale Aston Martin.

Ubuntu for Android Gets Shown Off and Detailed. Very cool, though I think that the realities of using this (ie: having to have the HDMI dock for example) might not be as awesome in real life, but it’s still a very cool system! A true “computer in your pocket”. Kudos to my coworker Ben for passing this on.

Note: Video language is Portugese.

Good news that Pinterest is finally out of invite-only mode, and you no longer have to wait for an invite to get on the site (not that it seems to have taken that long for people).

For those of you who haven’t joined Pinterest yet, this means you can sign up without waiting for an invite: all you have to do is go to Pinterest.com to get started. In addition to using your Facebook or Twitter login, we’re also opening registration so you can sign up with just your email address.

Looking forward to seeing how well the site handles the no-doubt huge influx of new users.

Wow, I know that @marcoarment talked about the rumors of this on last weeks podcast, but I didn’t expect it would actually happen. But saw this morning that TextMate 2 has gone Open Source, with the source now up on github.

This is a bit of the end of an era. TextMate is one of the canonical text editors on the Mac, and vaulted to some fame after the original Ruby on Rails “blog in 15 minutes” screencast. TextMate 2 was announced several years ago, but never materialized until an alpha was promised and (barely) delivered before Christmas of 2011. Minimal changes have happened since then, leaving the faithful with a crisis of faith if MacroMates was actually working on it, had abandoned it, or what was going on. This was made even worse by the several-year-long wait from TextMate 1 to the public Alpha of TextMate 2.

On the upside, hopefully the release of the open source software, combined with the fact that TextMate is primarily a programmers editor, will mean that the bugs will get squashed and the editor will soar like a phoenix and become the awesome editor that everyone’s wanted.

I can’t wait for some of the people more “in the know” to weigh in on this with some commentary.

Updates:

• Here’s the blog entry from MacroMates
• Marco’s take on it isn’t that enthusiastic.

The Official Google Blog has a great post on Building the search engine of the future, one baby step at a time which details their current and upcoming steps to make their search even more relevant.

AllThingsD’s post about how an internal document from Samsung in 2010 basically says that to make the Galaxy S1 better, make it more like the iPhone. Pretty damning evidence, but I don’t want to talk about patents or these ridiculous (and wasteful) court cases. For me what’s more interesting (and I’m sorry for the non-Apple fanboys in the audience) is the differences in the software UI. Apple is lauded as having great user interfaces (well, by some anyway), and many who look at the Mac and iOS UIs and say either “meh” or “well duh, that’s obvious [that you would have it that way]”.

For me what’s cool is looking through the document and seeing the points where Apple got it right and others (in this case, Samsung) didn’t. The little things that the “Apple people” like and others ignore, such as (page 31) on the iPhone where the numbers font size is reduced to show more in the field as more numbers are typed, or (page 62) that the web browser on the iPhone disables the add bookmark button when the page isn’t loaded.

Little tiny details, maybe inconsequential to those who value software freedom, but a really interesting look at the “little details” that Apple is so proud of. Also the fact that pretty much every suggestion is “make this more like how Apple does it” has to mean something.

You can read the full document here or view the embed below: